Ovid - Style

Style

Ovid is traditionally considered the final significant love elegist in the evolution of the genre and one of the most versatile in his handling of the genre's conventions. Like the other canonical elegiac poets Ovid takes on a persona in his works that emphasizes subjectivity and personal emotion over traditional militaristic and public goals, a convention which has been linked by some scholars with the relative stability provided by the Augustan settlement. However, although Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius may have been inspired in part by personal experience (the validity of "biographical" readings of these poets' works is a serious point of scholarly contention) Ovid has been seen as taking on a persona in his poetry which is far more emotionally detached from his mistress and less involved in crafting a unique emotional realism within the text than the other elegists. This attitude, coupled with the lack of testimony which identifies Ovid's Corinna with a real person has led scholars to conclude that Corinna was never a real person and that Ovid's relationship with her is an invention for his elegiac project. Some scholars have even interpreted Corinna as a metapoetic symbol for the elegiac genre itself.

Ovid has been considered a highly inventive love elegist who plays with traditional elegiac conventions and elaborates the themes of the genre; Quintilian even calls him a "sportive" elegist. In some poems, he uses traditional conventions in new ways, such as the paraklausithyron of Am. 1.6, while other poems seem to have no elegiac precedents and appear to be Ovid's own generic innovations, such as the poem on Corinna's ruined hair (Am. 1.14). Ovid has been traditionally seen as far more sexually explicit in his poetry than the other elegists. His erotic elegy covers a wide spectrum of themes and viewpoints; the Amores focus on Ovid's relationship with Corinna, the love of mythical characters is the subject of the Heroides, and the Ars Amatoria and the other didactic love poems provide a handbook for relationships and seduction from a (mock-)"scientific" point of view. In his treatment of elegy, scholars have traced the influence of rhetorical education in his enumeration, in his effects of surprise, and in his transitional devices. Some commentators have also noted the influence Ovid's interest in love elegy in his other works, such as the Fasti and have distinguished his "elegiac" style from his "epic" style. Richard Heinze in his famous Ovids elegische Erzählung delineated the distinction between Ovid's styles by comparing the Fasti and Metamorphoses versions of the same legends such as the treatment of Ceres–Proserpina story in both poems. Heinze demonstrated that, "whereas in the elegiac poems a sentimental and tender tone prevails, the hexameter narrative is characterized by an emphasis on solemnity and awe..." His general line of argument has been accepted by Brooks Otis, who wrote:

The gods are "serious" in epic as they are not in elegy; the speeches in epic are long and infrequent compared to the short, truncated and frequent speeches of elegy; the epic writer conceals himself while the elegiac fills his narrative with familiar remarks to the reader or his characters; above all perhaps, epic narrative is continuous and symmetrical... whereas elegiac narrative displays a marked asymmetry ...

Otis wrote that in the Ovidian poems of love, he "was burlesquing an old theme rather than inventing a new one." Otis states that the Heroides are more serious and, though some of them are "quite different from anything Ovid had done before he is here also treading a very well-worn path" to relate that the motif of females abandoned by or separated from their men was a "stock motif of Hellenistic and neoteric poetry (the classic example for us is, of course, Catullus 66)." Otis also states that Phaedra and Medea, Dido and Hermione (also present in the poem) "are clever re-touchings of Euripides and Vergil." Some scholars, such as Kenney and Clausen, have compared Ovid with Virgil. According to them, Virgil was ambiguous and ambivalent while Ovid was defined and, while Ovid wrote only what he could express Virgil wrote for the use of language.